Monday, 6 October 2014

Redoubtable suppliers of warped doomcore and proletarian techno-theory PRAXIS have got the very last handful of copies of the 'highly covetable' Xylitol / Libbe Matz Gang split 7". No longer available either from me or from Libertatia Overseas Trading these are the last copies that are likely to circulate outside the discogs inflationary vortex.

Friday, 14 March 2014

Full, unedited transcript of "The Collector" interview, published in Record Collector magazine February 2014:

DJ and radio artist
Jim Backhouse was turned onto a lifetime's twin obsessions by tuning into seminal
pirate stations CentreForce and Fantasy FM in his parents' house in suburban
Hertfordshire in the late 80s. This prompted his first tentative experiments
with tape recorders and cheap keyboards, while sharing his primitive efforts
through the international tape network would link him up with a weird world of
DIY electronic arcana. Later in the 1990s he became part of the Kosmische collective
and a resident DJ at their legendary krautrock nights, also producing shows on
artists' radio station Resonance FM. Jim now records and performs as Xylitol
and his latest release 'Kunst Ist Tot', on filmmaker Peter Strickland's
'Peripheral Conserve' label, is graced with artwork by Nurse With Wound's
Steven Stapleton. He currently lives in Canterbury and co-runs Radio Arts, an artists'
collective promoting hands on radiophonic experimentation. www.radioarts.org.uk.

THE COLLECTOR
QUESTIONS

What do you collect,
and why?

I collect
experimental, unusual and interesting music from around the world, mostly on
vinyl but also on tape and CD. I'm drawn to music that overreaches itself or
strives beyond the limits of genre or taste. The most interesting records to me
seem to have that desire etched into their grooves. I see record collecting as
a form of self-curating that millions get up to without even giving it a second
thought, so I'm interested - when I acquire a record - not only in the context
of that record within some 'canonical history of music' and the mythology that
accrues around it in that way, but also in its social side: the forms of
subjectivity that record produced in the people that heard it, how it might fit
into wider social struggles. I suppose it follows that I'm not too worried
about keeping 'Near Mint' copies filed away. In fact if it's been added to -
say with a child's cartoon drawings on the cover or the obsessive's annotations
- then that's a bonus as far as I'm concerned.

I can be a faddy collector,
sometimes hunting down underground NDW 7"s, or else obsessively collecting
early white label grime 12"s, but krautrock and early electronic experiments
have been a constant. When I first started DJing in the early 90s a friend's
dad had a collection of the fabled Phillips 'Prospective 21' LPs; with their
shiny silver covers they held a totemic fascination. Despite their almost total
evasion of anything I would've recognised as rhythm or melody, their weird, spectral
electronics seemed to resonate with the cold abstraction I loved in the best early
'bleep & bass' and techno sides. I suppose that tension between the
communal jouissance of early house
and hardcore and the supposed hermeticism of the 'avant-garde' still drives my
collecting to this day.

How big is your
collection?

It's not an enormous
collection as I have fairly regular clearouts, but I'd estimate I've around 3,000
LPs and 12"s and about 1000 7"s. I have lots of CDs and a few tapes too,
if they count. I also have the minidisc archive of 'You Are Hear', the radio show
I co-produced on Resonance FM which holds several hundred sessions and
interviews with the likes of Carter Tutti, Simon Fisher Turner, Nurse With
Wound, Momus and The Bohman Brothers. One day these will be rescued from
ye-obsolete-digital-medium limbo in order to make them available for all, permission
from artists pending, of course.

What do you think it is
worth?

I'd only venture about half of them to be particularly rare or collectable, but if I were to set
a hypothetical median of £10 per record, then that would make the collection
worth around £30000. That's probably a very inaccurate estimate though, but as I'm not keeping them stored away in lieu of a retirement
plan I won't worry too much.

How and where do you
store it?

They all live at
home, the bulk of them resting precariously on Ikea shelves lining the walls of
our spare room that doubles up as Radio Arts' 'office'. An ever shifting
selection of current favourites are also stacked in the front room next to the stereo
which is, of course, where they should be.

What’s the rarest/most
unusual/most valuable item you have?

Some of my 'minimal
synth' singles and LPs are quite rare: the Monoton 'Blau' LP is a wonderful set
of dub-inflected minimal electronics from 1980 that also happens to be uncannily
ahead of its time. The man behind it, Konrad Becker is a fascinating character, pretty unique in straddling the outer reaches of experimental DIY electronics, hardcore techno and hypermedia activism. I also have some pretty rare Krautrock records,
although they're probably not quite the mythic 'holy grails' the hardcore
collectors get so hot under the collar about: I have the first Gila LP, the Ash
Ra Tempel LP with the multi-fold-out sleeve, as well as a couple of other nice Ohr
LPs and 'Green Brain' records, a few nice Conrad Schnitzler LPs and tapes; the lovely Herr Roedelius, Dieter
Moebius and Michael Rother were also kind enough to sign the gatefold of my 'Musik
von Harmonia' LP after their gig at London's South Bank. I also love this
test-pressing of the Arts Council funded 'Experiments In Disintegrating
Language / Konkrete Canticle' LP that came from Bob Cobbing's personal archive,
even if it's not much to look at. It features some joyously unhinged sound poetry
experiments by Bob, Charles Verey, Michael Chant and others.

What elusive gem are
you still looking for?

I don't often go out searching
for particular records, preferring to let them find me by a combination of
chance and intuition, but that said, in my dream bargain basement I would look
forward to finding a copy of the Toshio Ichiyanagi 'Opera for Tadanori Yokoo'
box set, while in the singles pile I might hope to find a set of Ake Hodell's self-published
text-sound 7"s. I have a big list of Italo Disco rarities I dream of one day finding too, although the prices on discogs border on terrifying.

What’s given you the
biggest thrill?

It's always exciting
to find something unfamiliar, and to uncover how it fits together, to join the
dots and create a narrative. I found a copy of the 'Great Complotto Pordenone'
LP in a charity shop in South London, a compilation from 1980 documenting a northern
Italian local punk scene that embraced a precociously smart and gloriously
snotty form of media subversion and self-mythologising to such a degree that it
almost became a form of avant-garde provocation in itself. Tracing the
connections, from the aftermath of the radical social movements of 1970s Italy
to the later experiments in collective myth-making and media intervention of
the 'Luther Blissett' project in the 1990s and early '00s led to hours of
research, networking and many fascinating conversations. Some of this stuff is
well known in Italy, but almost nothing's been published on the experimental
fringes of Italian post-punk and DIY media in English.

So, although that's
an extreme example, the possibility of being taken again on that sort of
adventure is for me one of the motors of collecting and I suppose it's one
thing that the digital era and social networks have actually made easier, even
while the proliferation of 'if you like X,
you should try Y' algorithms pretends
to have made such excursions redundant.

How do you track
stuff down?

When I lived in
London I was one of those dysfunctional moles who would spend hours digging
through the bargain basements in the Music and Video Exchange shops for
discarded 25p and 50p records - I somehow disinterred some fantastic, rare and at
the very least a bit obscure records that way, like a set of the famous German Expressionist painter AR
Penck's free jazz LPs with silk-screened covers, and a copy of Charles Bullen
from This Heat's 'Lifetones' LP, which is a masterpiece of melancholic
post-punk dub. Now, living in East Kent there's a wealth of charity shops, boot
fairs and the odd record shop to keep me going, while I do the odd trade and
enjoy getting tip-offs from other collectors. I buy on ebay or discogs occasionally,
but for me it doesn't compare to the chance encounters you get out in the wilderness.

What’s your favourite
record shop?

Discovering the These
Records shop when I was in my early twenties was nothing short of an epiphany:
a square room on an unassuming residential street in South London with a tin
bath full of magnetic tape in the middle of the floor, the walls lined with
racks of vinyl, CDs, tapes, books and pamphlets, categorised by their own idiosyncratic,
consensus-reason defying taxonomy. Despite its untimely closure it still
functions as my blueprint for the perfect record shop: a space of learning and
play and an embodiment of experimental music as an indivisible part of a still
unfolding counterculture. I also love Rare & Racy in Sheffield which I
really hope is still going, and I have the highest hopes for Vinyl Deptford,
which Rocket Ron, former proprietor of the legendary Ambient Soho shop on
Berwick Street, has just opened.

How often do you
listen to the stuff in your collection?

Having spent more
than twenty years collecting and DJing there's no avoiding how embedded records
are into the very fabric of my everyday life and rituals. So, yes, my record collection
gets listened to every single day. I'm not averse to downloading and streaming
too, but it's easy to be overwhelmed by the hyper abundance of booty on sites
like Ubuweb. And apart from that, like everyone else I spend enough hours of my
waking life staring at a screen to find listening to an MP3 or a webstream a
poor substitute for the ritual and commitment of acquiring and putting on a
record, CD, or tape. If nothing else the physical connection serves as a
reminder that music isn't just a magical commodity that appears on your iphone from
nowhere.

Is there a visual side
to collecting for you?

Yes, the visual side
is hugely important, and I'm easily (perhaps too easily) turned off from a
record by particular tropes: I'm especially suspicious of conspicuously
'deluxe' packaging: the curse of the vellum-bound mausoleum piece boxset. On
the other hand, any example of DIY ostentation, discordant geometrical design, baroque
gimmicry, brash agit prop, desperate expediency, etc. will nearly always pique my interest. This
formula has served me pretty well so far.

How will you
eventually dispose of your collection?

For all my personal
investment in it, I doubt it'll ever pay for my retirement, so in all
likelihood, it'll be either passed on to my partner Magz (who herself has a
formidable collection ranging from esoteric sound art to C86 jangle-pop) or else my son Ewart, now five, will some day have a very unwieldy inheritance to deal with and then it'll be up to him if he wants
to keep it, share it out, flog the valuable bits on ebay, or just donate the
lot to a charity shop.

What’s your all-time
favourite record, regardless of value or rarity?

My favourite LP would
have to be The Faust Tapes - it wasn't only a gateway drug for me, but it's also
an inexhaustible document: even after 20 years repeated listening it still
reveals some new facet every time. My favourite single would be The Apostles
'Smash The Spectacle' EP which is an unsurpassed volley of proletarian anger, bleak
wit and self-reflexive intelligence that could only have been recorded under
the darkest hour of Thatcherism, and yet today it's more prescient than ever.